Sense of Place Writing Templates

One of the most important factors directly influencing learning is what the learner already knows. How can we maximize instructional time to uncover prior knowledge of our students to provide effective science instruction and link science content with students’ past experiences? 

The authors of the article Connecting student experiences to scientific content before, during, and after instruction developed sense-of-place writing templates as a way to address the previous question.  They proposed using short-answer, essay, and induced associative responses, sense-of-place templates to offer opportunities for students to reflect upon their past connections. 

The authors believe that Writing templates reveal interesting information about students’ past experiences and their perceptions of the world around them and that the findings can be used as a starting point for classroom discussion. Writing templates also identify potential gaps that can be addressed in the classroom.

Here are the templates for your consideration. 

They are simple and easy to adapt to our settings. I hope they are useful!